Notes on Karl Marx's Capital Volume One
[All page references refer to the unabridged Penguin Edition]
Chapter One: Commodities
The Two Factors of the Commodity
125 The capitalist economy consists of commodities. A commodity is an object of consumption or of production. It satisfies a need and this need is referred to as the commodity’s use-value.
[126 Footnote cites Locke ‘The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniences of human life’]
[Funny sidebar: ‘In English writers of the seventeenth century we still often find the word ‘worth’ used for use-value and ‘value’ for exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflection’.]
Where these needs arise from is a broader social question but use-value is also in the physical thing itself; it has a real existence and the use is realised in the commodity’s consumption whereas the thing-ness of the commodity is the bearer of its exchange-value.
[Footnote: ‘In bourgeois society the legal fiction prevails that each person, as a buyer, has an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities’.]
127 Exchange-value renders a commodity commensurate, makes it possible to compare and conflate it with other things and have it move around in exchange for those things. So a given commodity, e.g. wheat ‘has many exchange values instead of one’. So we might say 1 corn = x iron and x wool and x coal etc.
This exchange value is an abstraction. It expresses use value at a level beyond the mere commodity itself.
128 Use value is qualitative, it works at the point of consumption. If you’re hungry, cheese will do you while steel won’t.
Exchange value is quantitative; if you’re hungry and you have steel you could exchange it for cheese, but these two functions are distinct. You can’t eat an exchange value or hammer it into a car.
In order to understand exchange value it is necessary to ignore its physical, tangible and sensuous aspects. From an exchange perspective it is not important if something is a table or a piece of yarn.
129 And as this value is quantitative, the decisive unit is the amount of labour it contains which is measured in duration, hours, day, etc.
This does not mean that if a labourer takes six months to make a single shirt that shirt is worth millions, because while it is a quantitative measurement its also an abstract one; all human labour consists of a single homogenous mass which forms a socially average unit of necessary labour power on average.
This equilibrium which is called socially necessary labour-time and it is the labour time required to produce any use-value under conditions of production normal for a given society, i.e. with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour regnant within it.
For example, the introduction of power-looms in England reduced the labour time required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. It did not make the labour process itself shorter, but the product of an individual hour of labour now represented half an hour of social labour, and fell to one half its former value.
[Footnote in which Marx finds his theory anticipated in a document on Money written in the 1730’s]
130 The value of a commodity would remain static if the labour-time required for production remained static. But this changes with every variation in the productivity of labour, which is altered by advances in technology and machinery as well as:
- the worker’s average degree of skill
- the social organisation of the producers of production
- the extent and effectiveness of the means of production
- conditions found in the natural environment (e.g. the same quantity of labour is present in eight bushels of corn in favourable seasons and only four in unfavourable seasons and the same quantity of labour provides more metal in rich mines than in poor.)
131 The more productive labour is the less labour-time is required to produce an article, the less labour is crystallised in that article and the lower its value.
The value of a commodity therefore varies as the quantity and, counter-intuitively, the productivity of the labour which finds its realisation within the commodity.
A thing can be a use-value without being a value, i.e. directly obtained without mediation through exchange, e.g. the peasant who grows crops which are directly consumed by himself or his feudal lord.
The corn received as rent-in-kind does not become a commodity just because it is produced for others. In order to become a commodity the product must be transferred to the other person, for whom it serves as a use-value, through exchange.
2. The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities
132 In a society based on commodity production, labour is necessarily divided.
133 Before commodity production became dominant labour was a condition of human existence; clothes were made in antiquity, farming was divided in pre-historical agriculture.
137 There is a difference between concrete and abstract labour; the former pertains to use value, the second to exchange.
3. The Value Form, or Exchange-Value
138 Commodities have both concrete and abstract traits. Cheese has hunger-satisfying aspects, steel is durable, but what links them together and renders them commensurate is their containing labour-power.
142 Labour-power is not value in itself, it only becomes value once it is concretised in an objective form.
145 As before this commensurability varies: the labour-time necessary for the production of 20 yards of linen or 1 coat varies with every influence in the productivity of the weaver or the tailor.
147 - 8 As an equivalent Commodity A (the linen) imposes on Commodity B (the coat) a form of value particular to it. The linen brings into view its own existence as a value in the fact that it can be assumed as a form of value separate from its own physical being.
This commensurability makes it possible to compare the concrete or private labour in the linen with the abstract or social labour embodied in the coat.
In this way the commodity’s value is no longer qualitative but becomes relative, because a commodity can never express the magnitude of its own value. It needs that reflection in the form of a Commodity B.
149 Value is therefore social, it’s not something that can be measured independently. We cannot understand the amount of value in a single tyre or cheese-wheel independently of the broader social productive process.
151 Section about how Aristotle could not think his way past market relations without this concept of value, so he couldn’t see that what every pair of commodities have in common is abstract labour.
153 Examples of two schools of orthodox economists who only grapple with one side of value, whether quantitative or qualitative, and miss the dual character of the phenomenon as a result.
156 The relative value of each commodity is an endless series of expressions of value which are all different from the relative form of value of every other commodity.
162 The general form of value then gives way to the money form.
4. The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret
167 This next step from value to money is a necessary extension because producers do not come into contact with one another on the market through barter, their purchases are mediated through the market.
168 A fully-fledged market of commodity production develops over a long time-frame.
169 Its operations and relations are obscured or reified, which finds its expression in the incorrect and self-serving assertions put forward by orthodox political economists.
[175 footnote: ‘the vulgar economists confine themselves to systematising in a pedantic way, and proclaiming for everlasting truths, the banal and complacent notions held by the bourgeois agents of production about their own world, which is to them the best possible one’, and he calls a few of these economists dwarfs and asses.]
170 Uses feudalism and the story of Robinson Crusoe (a 1719 novel written by Daniel Defoe about a man who washes up on an island off the coast of Venezuela and establishes a ‘self-sufficient society’) to describe moments, both historical or imagined, in which the trajectory of commodities, outputs of labour and / or agriculture are clear, as it appears as personal relations and not social relations between things.
171 Reference to what a communist society would look like:
‘Let us finally imagine…an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’.
172 - 176 Class series of riffs on political economy and Christianity.
Chapter 2: The Process of Exchange
178 - 9 Commodities cannot circulate by themselves, their buyers and sellers must encounter one another in the market as ‘personifications of economic relations’
For the seller, a commodity has no use-value, for the buyer it does. This changing of hands constitutes exchange.
181 Money arises out of these requirements and further entrenches the separation between use-value and value.
182 - 3 Brief account of the historical roots of money, how it first arises among nomadic peoples because their possessions are mobile and their form of life brings them into contact with other communities, encouraging the exchange of products.
183 In order to better service the needs of circulation in a modern society, the money-form assumes the shape of precious metals as these are the commodities best fitted to ‘perform the social function of a universal equivalent.
184 firstly because their ’every sample possesses the same uniform quantity’ and secondly because they are divisible.
185 Just because precious metals represent a symbol of value does not mean that they are unreal; they give witness to an actual social relationship, namely a series of exchanges which necessitate a common unit.
As with commodities, precious metals exist on both the concrete and abstract levels: ’every commodity is a symbol, since, as value, it is only the material shell of the human labour expended on it’.
186 Money is also similar to the commodity in the sense that its value can only be expressed in other forms of itself. This value is determined ‘by the labour-time required for its production…expressed in the quantity of any other commodity in which the same amount of labour-time is congealed’.
187 Once money has become a universal equivalent, human activity becomes increasingly atomised: ‘Their own relations of production…assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action’.
Chapter 3: Money, or the Circulation of Commodities
1. The Measure of Values
188 It is not just money that renders commodities commensurate, they already are commensurate by virtue of having human labour in common.
189 But money does grant this equation of commodities a socially valid character, there is no longer any need for the 1 iron = 5 wheat because of money.
191 Gold then becomes a universal measurement.
193 The price of money and the price of commodities are independent; one may rise and one may fall, both may rise or fall together.
The terms originally assigned to specific amounts of precious metals (a ‘pound’ initially referred to a pound of silver) become autonomous over time because:
- the introduction of foreign coinage which develop different names
- the development of material wealth; copper edging out silver, edged out in turn by gold
- successive waves of de-valuation
194 In this way the nature of money has been reified beyond its actual function, a confusion that is assisted by the fact that they at once real and unreal.
[One enduring controversy of Marxist economics and / or Marxology is known as the transformation problem, namely whether or not Marx provides us with a comprehensive account of how the abstract value of the commodity becomes a concrete price in a competitive marketplace. There are a number of comments in this chapter which pertain to this question so they will be signalled from this point on]
196 [Material on the Transformation Problem]
The magnitude of a commodity’s value expresses the socially average labour-time required to produce it. When this commodity’s value is realised in its sale this appears as the exchange-ratio between a single commodity and the money-commodity.
This relation may express the magnitude of value and the greater or lesser quantity of money it can be sold for according to a particular set of circumstances. Therefore there is the possibility that there will be a disproportion between these two; this asymmetry is fundamental to the price-form.
‘This is not a defect, but, on the contrary, it makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities’.
197 Price might cease to express value altogether; one could sell courage or honour, things which command a price without value, but it might also conceal a real value-relation.
2. The Means of Circulation
(a) The Metamorphosis of Commodities
198 Great image regarding the nature of contradiction
‘it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another and at the same time constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion within which this contradiction is both realised and resolved’.
This is the social metabolism in the mode of production known as capitalism.
200 We are given a simple, two-stage equation to express the process of exchange:
Commodity -> Money -> Commodity or CMC
The first stage, commodity to money, is the decisive moment, this decides whether or not a commodity can command a price.
201 - 3 In order for a commodity to command a price, it must have a use-value for the purchaser.
Material on the Transformation Problem
‘We leave out of consideration here any possible subjective errors in calculation by the owner of the commodity, which will immediately be corrected objectively in the market. We suppose him to have spent only the average socially necessary quantity of labour time. The price of the commodity…is merely the money-name of the quantity of social labour objectified in it’.
The articulation of this metamorphosis is not straightforward it takes place in haphazard and spontaneous ways across the market, the sellers:
‘find out that the same division of labour which turns them into private producers also makes the social process of production and the relations of the individual producers to each other…independent of the producers themselves’.
‘The realisation of a commodity’s price, or of its merely ideal value-form, is therefore at the same time, and inversely, the realisation of the merely ideal use-value of money; the conversion of a commodity into money is the conversion of money into a commodity’.
Every purchase is a sale, every sale a purchase, C -> M is also at once M -> C from the point of view of the buyer.
208 But this does not mean equilibrium is achieved. Every sale might well be a purchase, but they constitute two separate acts between two people in opposition to one another.
209 The independence of buyers and sellers may also assert themselves; this is what happens in a crisis within a capitalist economy.
(b) The Circulation of Money
213 As money and commodities always come into physical confrontation with each other, the amount of money that is required to facilitate their movement in exchange is equal to the sum of all prices. Since prices rise and fall, the amount of money required to move commodities around may also rise or fall.
214 One commodity infects another through their common value-relation, so their prices gradually settle down into proportions determined by their comparative values until the values of all commodities are estimated in terms of the new value of the monetary metal.
216 A decisive factor in this regard is the question of turnover:
the quantity of money functioning as the circulating medium = the sum of prices / divided the number of times coins of the same denomination turn over
The measure of how often a coin turns over is known as its velocity.
Velocity differs significantly according to context, place, time, level of social development etc.
If there are less turnovers, less coin is necessary and vice versa.
217 These dynamics also might provoke the system into crisis as they are non-simultaneous. As before, orthodox economists ascribe this to insufficient money in the system.
[218 Footnote: this is not to suggest that insufficient money in the system is not one of the causes of some crises, but it is only one reason among others and often serves the purpose of excluding more long-run dynamics from consideration.]
(c) Coin. The Symbol of Value
221 In sum, average value commands average price.
222 - 3 History of the use of precious metals as money, the role of the state in minting them.
224 Introduction of credit and paper money into the argument.
225 Only insofar as paper money represents gold does it have value.
3. Money
(a) Hoarding
227 As money becomes that universal repository of value, the urge develops to retain a hold over it, as it is an index of social power.
229 - 230 Various quotes from classical sources about the dangers of money as tending towards the destruction of previously existing social relations.
(b) Means of Payment
235 As purchase and sale are non-identical, certain forms of monetary infrastructure develop between buyers, sellers, debtors and borrowers to offset their debts. This reduces the amount of actual money moving around as money is functioning only nominally on balance sheets.
236 This is what brings markets flooded with credit into crisis every few years; a sudden realisation that there’s no money behind this movement of assets.
Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital
247 The circulation of commodities as the starting-point of capital.
[Origin of capitalism]
‘The production of commodities and their circulation in its developed form, namely trade, form the historic presuppositions under which capital arises. World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold’.
Money is the first form of capital.
The first distinction between money and capital is the simple distinction between the difference in their form of circulation in C-M-C and re-conversion of money into commodities - selling in order to buy.
248 The movement of M-C-M passes through two antithetical phases.
The first phase = M-C (the purchase): Money is changed into a commodity.
The second phase = C-M (the sale): Commodity is changed back again into money.
‘These two phases, conceived of in a unity, constitute the total movement which exchanges money for a commodity, and the same commodity for money, which buys a commodity in order to sell it.’
At root here is the exchange of money for money, M-M.
249 In C-M-C, money is at the end converted into a commodity that serves as a use-value, it has been spent once and for all.
In this phase, the same piece of money is displaced twice; the seller gets it from the buyer and pays it away to another seller.
In M-C-M, the buyer lays out money so that he can get money back. The money is not spent, it is only advanced.
Here, it is not the money that moves twice but the commodity; the twofold displacement of the same piece of money causes the money to flow back to its original point of departure.
252 It is also possible that in C-M-C, the two extremes may represent quantitatively different magnitudes of value. The peasant may sell his corn at higher than its original value or more, he may be cheated by the clothes merchant, but these differences are accidents, they don’t change the substance of what is happening.
When selling in order to buy, we aim at satisfying one’s needs via consumption.
When buying in order to sell our end and our beginning are the same: €100 -> €110, capital M -> M’, this increase in capital becomes an end in itself.
253 Aristotle described how trade was barter but as trade developed further money became necessary as the lubricant to facilitate transactions on a broader scale.
This creates a field separable from economics; chrematistics, which revolves around money as a beginning and end, and these, for Aristotle, are often confused, reflecting the stage of economic and social development his society had reached at the time.
254 The conscious bearer of this movement is a capitalist. He is the person from whom money departs and to whom it returns. Use-value is unimportant for him, his immediate aim is profit, and not just profit on a single transaction, but a continuous and unceasing movement at profit-making.
255 Money is both independent, becoming itself in abolishing itself, but is also the active subject.
256 This is a situation that does not just apply to merchant capital or trade but also to industrial capital, which operates according to the same logic.
257 M-C-M’ is the general form of capital.
Chapter 5: Contradictions in the General Formula
258 The two people involved on either pole of M-C-M’ have no relationship with one another, they are confronted only in the context of individual transactions, not the overall cycle.
[On the issue of whether or not value is formed in circulation: Important to note that he prefaces this with making clear that this is an abstract example]
260 What is happening here is a change in form, the value remains constant as the same quantity of social labour remains in the hand of the commodity-owner, in the form of the commodity or in the form of money; it is not an increase in value.
261 - 2 Some of the mistakes bourgeois economists make in taking circulation for value creation.
262 ‘It is plain that no one abstracts more value from circulation than he throws into it’.
263 The formation of surplus value has nothing to do with whether a commodity was sold above its value or not.
[The transformation problem]
269 ‘If prices actually differ from values, we must first reduce the former to the latter, i.e. disregard this situation as an accidental one in order to observe the phenomenon of the formation of capital on the basis of the exchange of commodities in its purity, and to prevent our observations from being interfered with by disturbing incidental circumstances which are irrelevant to the actual course of the process…The continual oscillations in prices, their rise and fall, compensate each other, cancel each other out, and carry out their own reduction to an average price which is their internal regulator’.
Chapter 6: The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power
270 Labour as a source of value.
271 In order for the commodity owner to increase the value of the commodities in their possession they must find, on the market, a person willing to sell their own labour capacity. They enter into relations with each other as equals in the eyes of the law.
The seller of labour power sells their labour for a limited period, rather than all in one go, as this would make them a slave, ‘from an owner of a commodity into a commodity’.
272 - 3 The owner of labour power must also have no other commodity for sale…‘he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realisation of his labour-power’.
[Historical transition to capitalism]
274 _‘money, as we have seen, exists prior to the existence of capitalism proper, but commodity circulation is, at this time, limited in terms of how far it can develop’. _
‘The historical conditions of its existence [capital] are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour power. And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world’s history’.
The labour-time necessary for the production of a commodity determines the value of labour-power, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average social labour embodied within it.
276 - 7 Wages, in additional to historical and moral elements [E.P. Thompson writes on this], are determined by how much it costs for the worker to reproduce their own conditions of existence.
Chapter 7: The Labour Process and the Valorisation Process
1. The Labour Process
283 Marx begins the chpater by considering labour outside of any specific social or historical formation, as process by man through his own actions, mediates regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.
284 This activity is specific to man. This is not to say that animals don’t work, but man is unique in that man envisions what he does or make ideally before he does so.
Difference between raw materials and the ‘free gifts of nature’:
‘All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connection with their environment are objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature, such as fish caught and separated from their natural element, namely water, timber felled in virgin forests, and ores extracted from their veins. If, on the other hand, the object of labour has, so to speak, been filtered through previous labours, we call it raw material’.
285 As such, activities such as e.g.agriculture requires a relatively significant amount of social development
286 Man is therefore a tool-making animal. Instruments of labour from antiquity are the fossil record of human civilisation, it is not what is made by how, and in what way that distinguishes distinct economic epochs.
287 Use-value is created by adapting natural material to human need. This is done by labour being induced into the object. What appeared from the worker’s point of view as exertion or ‘unrest’ is now a fixed, objective characteristic in an object.
Use-values created in previous exertions of labour also enter into the labour process in creating of a new object; products can be the output of labour as well as the inputs.
288 These products may form a crucial part of the resultant commodity, such as lead going into solder or they may be only accessories such as oil being used to light the factory.
289 In encountering these objects the living labour power of the worker awakens the dead labour in these objects from the dead into real and effective use-value.
290 The use living labour puts them to is a form of consumption known as ‘productive consumption’. This is distinct from individual consumption in that it is not a using up of products for subsistence purposes while productive consumption aims at the production of use values, ’the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence’.
291 As the capitalist purchases labour power through the workers’ wages he owns the labour-power as a commodity, and deploys it as he sees fit; i.e. its application to the dead labour of other products he owns, to imbue their dead labour with living labour to preserve their use-values for sale.
2. The Valorisation Process
294 The preservation of use-values can require labour-power to be imbued in a product at a number of different places and times, picking the cotton and spinning the yarn can all be considered as different stages in the same labour process.
296 In the course of a given labour process, a specific quantity of labour has entered the resultant commodity, but only socially necessary labour time counts towards this value’s creation.
298 Presents an example whereby the capitalist might recoup no profit.
300 The use-value of labour and the wages extended in order to recoup that use-value are non-identical.
301 Account of how surplus value is transformed into capital.
302 If the process of recouping surplus value proceeds, it is part of the process of valorisation.
[Slavery]
303 Footnote regarding why slavery was inefficient in comparison w/ capitalism.
305 The concrete labour performed will become abstract.
[Footnote on skilled versus unskilled labour; argues skilled labour is a kink that will be steadily transformed into unskilled labour over time.]
Chapter 8: Constant Capital and Variable Capital
307 Summary of the previous chapter.
It is not the case that the worker labours to create new value on the one hand and produces value on the other; labour is twofold and both of these processes occur simultaneously.
309 Presents an example whereby a machine is developed that allows a spinner to become six times more effective and to spin as much cotton in 6 hours as he formerly accomplished in 36. This 36lbs of cotton absorbs the same amount of labour as the 6lbs did formerly, but the value added by the labour of the spinner to each pound of raw material is a sixth of what it was before.
It is possible for the exchange value of the cotton to fluctuate if this technological innovation is introduced unevenly across the market; if a capitalist has a stockpile of cotton, they will find that the exchange value of his cotton has decreased by ~85%.
310 While the addition of new value and the reviving of old value are different processes, they are added in proportion to one another.
311 Means of production transfer new value to the commodity but only insofar as they lose their use and exchange value:
312 they cannot transfer more value than they lose during the process by the destruction of their own use-value.
If a machine is worth €10,000 and wears out in 10,000 days it transfers one-thousandth of its value every day. The machine continues to take part in the labour process throughout this period but in a way that it is increasingly diminished.
_‘Thus it appears that one factor of the labour process, a means of production, continually enters as a whole into that process, while it only enters in parts into the valourisation process’. _
317 Surplus value produces value over and above the value contained in the materials productively consumed in the course of the labour process.
Capital deployed in the labour process splits into two parts; constant and variable capital.
Constant capital, or C, refers to capital turned into means of production; raw material, auxiliary material and instruments of labour which do not undergo any quantitative alteration in the productive process.
Variable capital, or v, is capital which does undergo a quantitative alteration of value. It reproduces the equivalent of its own value, is transformed into labour and produces an excess or surplus which varies in turn according to circumstances.
Chapter 9: The Rate of Surplus Value
1. The Degree of Exploitation of Labour Power
322 Proof that an increase in value is due to v, which sets C = 0.
323 The precise concrete form that constant capital assumes is irrelevant, all that matters is that it absorbs labour expended in production.
324 If we subtract new value produced from the total expended on the labour process we are left with the amount of surplus value and from these two figures we can calculate the rate of profit or ’the relative magnitude of the surplus value’.
327 This rate of exploitation expresses how much of the working day is composed of socially necessary labour time.
Chapter 10: The Working Day
The Limits of the Working Day
341 The precise length of the working day varies; it does not always align with the exact number of hours a worker requires in order to reproduce their own conditions of existence; its total length varies with the duration of surplus labour expended.
It does however have hard limits, whether physical, mental or social, and these all vary according place, time, social, cultural development etc.
342 The working day is therefore a crucial site of struggle: the capitalist has extended variable capital in the form of wages in order to assert their control over the workers’ labour-power with a view to extracting a surplus over and above what he has paid for. (This is why the then-contemporary reformist notion of extracting a ‘just price’ for one’s work is a nonsense)
2. The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour. Manufacturer and Boyar
[Transition to Capitalism]
344 Surplus value pre-dates capitalism and can be found at any point in history in which a particular section of society enjoys a monopoly over the means of production, whether plantations in the southern United States or Norman baronies. In this situation workers will always be compelled to expend some of their own labour in order to extract their own sustenance.
345 However production for the sake of use-value as under feudalism introduces hard limits to surplus value extraction, there will be no accumulation of surplus value as an end in itself, at least until money becomes generalised as a universal equivalent.
[Slavery]
‘as soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour…are drawn into a world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for export develops into their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc. Hence he Negro labour in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately patriarchal character as long as production as directed to the satisfaction of immediately local requirements. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of the surplus-value itself’.
346 As the labourer works simultaneously for the capitalist (creating surplus value) and for his wages (reproducing his own conditions of existence) exploitation is not directly visible as it was under feudalism, when toil would be conducted on the lord’s field separate from his own holdings.
348 The English Factory Acts had the effect of imposing restrictions on the capitalist’s ability to recoup surplus from the labourer; this was won in the course of struggle and also because it is sometimes necessary for the bourgeois state to step in and mediate between capital and labour.
351 [Footnote on the degregation of child labour]
3. Branches of English Industry Without Legal Limits to Exploitation
353 - 4 agus níos mó ar an abhar seo, with notes from a state board investigating the factories.
358 ‘Capitalism is…at first indifferent towards the technical character of the labour process it seizes control of. At the outset, it takes it as it finds it’.
Concrete study of how the production process and the profit motive changes the output of bread produced in bakeries.
362 Labour struggle in Irish bakeries.
366 Amazing quote from Dr. Richardson:
‘The occupation, instinctive almost as a portion of human art, unobjectivionable as a branch of human industry, is made by mere excess of work the destroyer of the man. He can strike so many blows per day, walk so many steps, breathe so many breaths, produce so much work and live an average, say, of fifty years; he is made ot strike so many blows, to walk so many more steps, to breathe so many more breaths per day, and to increase altogether a fourth of his life. He meets the effort; the result is, that producing for a limited time a fourth more work, he dies at 37 for 50’.
4. Day-Work and Night-Work. The Shift System
367 Constant capital has to be absorbing labour power constantly; its lying fallow represents a loss for the capitalist and this is why the extension of the working day beyond its natural limits is in the capitalist’s interests. Shift work or night-work are two potential solutions since it is impossible for the capitalist to exploit the same workers for an entire day.
373 [Footnote with an amazing quote from Hegel: ‘In a time so rich in reflection and so devoted to raisonnement as our own, he must be a poor create who cannot advance a good ground for everything, even for what is worst and most depraved. Everything in the world that has become corrupt, has had good ground for its corruption’.]
5. The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Laws for the Compulsory Extension of the Working Day, From the Middle of the Fourteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century
375 The moral dimension of the degredation capitalism visits on the working class, the contradiction between keeping the Sabbath holy and extending working hours.
[Great footnote:
‘‘The amount of work,’ say Tremenheere and Tufnell, who drafted the general report, ‘done by boys, youths, girls and women in the course of their daily or nightly spell of labour, is certainly extraordinary’. Meanwhile, late at night perhaps, Mr Glass-Capital, stuffed full with abstinence, and primted with port wine, reels home from his club, droning out idiotically, ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves!’]
[Slavery]
377 Slave plantations as extreme instances in which the interests of the worker and those of the capitalist do not coincide to the extent that working them to death is an insignificant overhead cost to absorb.
378 - 9 Role of immigrants and labour mobility, effectively the trade in labour-power, in pressing working conditions down.
[Transition]
380 Capitalism’s dependence on agricultural labourers and the non-industrial population to sustain itself.
382 The process by which the agricultural labourer or peasant becomes a ‘free labourer’, selling their labour power in order to survive, is brutal, traumatic and prolonged, as he says on page 412:
‘The establishment of a normal working day is therefore the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class’.
383 - 411 Historical argument about the relationship between private enterprise and the state with regard to the working day.
7. The Struggle for a Normal Working Day. Impact of the English Factory Legislation on Other Countries
411 The drive to extract surplus labour takes place first in those sections which were revolutionised by water-power, steam and machinery.
[Nationalism and race]
414 On how the workers movement in the United States could not succeed until slavery was abolished
Chapter 11: The Rate and Mass of Surplus Value
417 How the mass of surplus value is calculated relative to the rate.
418 It is possible for the rate of surplus value to decrease while the mass of surplus value increases and vice versa.
419 [Footnote explaining the idiocy of the idea of supply and demand as an explanation for price, propagated by ’the vulgar economist, who imagines, like an inverted Archimedes, that in the determination of the market price of labour by supply and demand he has found the fulcrum by means of which he cannot so much move the world, as bring it to a standstill’.]
Chapter 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus Value
430 Relative surplus value can be inceased by shortening the amount of labour time which is socially necessary to produce a particular commodity.
432 As the reduction of socially necessary labour time is a consequence of the increase of surplus value the labour process is constantly revolutionised.
The increased surplus value re-couped from lengthening the working day is increased absolute surplus value.
The cheapening of a commodity by raising productivity in the sector in which it is produced resonates along the supply chain; a raising of the productivity in the production of thread will make shoes and clothes cheaper.
As the raising of productivity will shorten the amount of necessary labour time required to produce a commodity, larger portion of the working day is expended on the production of surplus value, which means the capitalist can sell the commodity at a price higher than the social price.
433 This the mechanism behind market competition.
436 Once the capitalists introduce the same innovation the advantage vanishes and the social price catches up.
437 The absolute value of a commodity is irrelevant to the capitalist: only the surplus is important.
Chapter 13: Co-operation
439 One of the conditions most important for the development of manufacture is the concentration of workers in one place.
It can be seen in the handicraft trades, with the primary difference between it and production under the guilds (presumably) is the number of people involved in the assembly of a particular commodity.
440 When a certain minimum of workers are concentrated in one place individual differences or deviations of productivity reach an equilibrium and average each other out.
441 This can only happen when a number of workers are employed by the same capitalist; this equalisation can occur when twelve workers toil for the same boss, but not if these twelve workers were toiling for six different bosses.
If one of these workers took significantly longer than the average socially necessary labour time to produce a commodity his labour would not count as average labour, it would be unsaleable or saleable only at less than the average value.
442 Concentration also secures economy in the mans of production, a smaller part of their value is distributed to each product.
448 Co-operation requires significant capital outlay in order to get started.
Which means it requires the productive forces to have reached a particular level.
449 Concentration and co-operation also clarifies the antagonism that exists between capital and labour.
450 The despotism integral to the capital / labour relationship assumes new forms, a new caste of foremen, supervisors and overseers develop.
[Slavery]
Footnote on how the USian frontier yeomanry, unlike slaves, do not require superintendence.
452 Pre-capitalist forms of co-operation are characterised by common ownership over the means of production and tribal or communitarian social forms in general. Co-operation in the middle ages and colonial settlements have depended on coercion, enslavement.
453 From the peasant and the artisan’s perspective, co-operation is a novel invention of capitalist production.
The productive power of capitalism is the productive power of concentrated labour, not the productive power of capital.
Chapter 14: The Division of Labour and Manufacture
The Dual Origin of Manufacture
455 The period Marx argues is characterised by manufacture extends from the middle of the sixteenth century to the last third of the eighteenth.
Its origin can be located firstly in the assembly of workers in a single workshop under a single capitalist, bringing together and rationalising a work process previously conducted by a number of individually employed handicraftsmen, e.g. tailors, locksmiths, glaziers, painters, gilders etc.
456 It may also happen by retaining these individual roles within a single premises; over time these individual roles manifest themselves as a division of labour.
2. The Specialised Worker and His Tools
458 This increases productivity.
470 In every craft it takes control of manufacture creates a class of ‘so-called unskilled labourers, a class strictly excluded by the nature of the handicraft industry’.
Manufacture develops a specialty towards the standardisation or perfection of efficient production it does so at the expense of the workers’ all-round human development (in a technical rather than spiritual sense).
For the unskilled labourer, the cost of apprenticeship vanishes, for the skilled labourer it falls.
One exception to this rule comes in instances where the development of the labour process throws up new and unforseen practices which did not exist in handicraft.
471 Footnote about how Marx changed his view of tribal society, believing that the family was a development subsequent to the tribe.
472 Account of spheres of production and exchange in tribal societies.
‘The foundation of every division of labour which has attained a certain degree of development, and has been brought about by the exchange of commodities, is the separation of town from country’.
473 Relatively large population an additional requirement for the productive capacity of labour in co-operation.
[Footnote which anticipates Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts]
475 Adam Smith doesn’t understand manufacture; the crucial distinction is that the individual artisan produces a commodity; in manufacture commodity are the common output of a mass of workers.
476 The division of labour within the workshop depends on the despotic power the capitalist wields over their own premises.
The division of labour within society depends on the dispersal of means of production among many independent producers.
Within the workshop definite amounts of workers will be subjected to definite functions in society outside the workshop the anarchic and unplanned nature of capitalist production prevails, these are necessary opposites of each other.
[Line about tending towards equilibrium here I’m not sure of]
477 pre-capitalist modes of society had planned economies and no division of labour.
[Asiatic Mode of Production]
479 ‘The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again in the same spot and with the same name - this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast with their constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remains untouched by the storms which blow up in the cloudy regions of politics.
487 - 8 Series of riffs on use-value in ancient Athenian, Spartan society.
Chapter 15: Machinery and Large-Scale Industry
1. The Development of Machinery
492 Under capitalism machinery does not reduce the difficulty of labour; its function is to cheapen commodities by reducing the amount of necessary labour time.
494 A machine consists of three parts:
i) the motor mechanism, such as a steam or electro-magnetic engine, which drives the machine as a whole ii) the transmitting mechanism, such as shafts, pulleys, straps or ropes, which regulate the motion and changes its form when necessary iii) the tool or working machine, which is the same apparatus or tool as a handicraftsman or manufacturing worker might use.
495 Some machines are a merely slightly altered version of old handicraft tools such as the power-loom, they may also be completely unaltered, such as knives in a chopping machine.
The same operations are being performed as in manufacture, but the machine has taken the place of a mere implement. In this way the number of tools which can be brought into play is independent of the organic limitations of the handicraftsman, who can only use as many tools as he or she can manipulate with their hands, limbs, etc.
496 It is the first component, the motor mechanism that underwent the most significant transformation in the course of the industrial revolution.
497 Motors did not bring the industrial revolution about in and of themselves; the steam-engine was invented towards the end of the seventeenth century. Their invention rather made a revolution necessary as an increase in machine size required more power.
504 As demand for machines increased and the machine-making industry developed the division of labour deepens tending towards the abolition of the handicraft and manufacturing systems.
In this way industry overthrows its foundation once it attains to a specific level of development as the machine’s productive capacity is no longer constrained by the limits of personal strength and skill.
513 Whenever it costs as much labour to produce a machine as is saved by the employment of that machine, all that has taken place is a movement of labour from one place to another; the total labour required to produce a commodity has not been reduced, the productivity of labour has not been increased.
515 - 7 Proof that the labour objectified in the machine is much lower in quantity than the living labour it replaces.
Whether or not the capitalist will adopt a particular machine is therefore determined by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it; cheaper labour is the only reason a capitalist will use a machine.
This is because the capitalist is making money from exploiting surplus labour, not through savings obtained through mechanisation; the machine does not produce value.
In some branches of industry a situation might arise in which wages fall below the value of labour-power, rendering machinery superfluous.
For example, yanks invented a stone-breaking machine that the Brits did not adopt because the men who carry out this work is paid for such a small portion of labour it would not be worth the investment.
The distinction between the necessary and surplus sections of the day can vary significantly, due to geographic, temporal or industrial factors even if the difference between the quantity of labour needed to produce the machine and the total quantity of labour replaced by it remains constant.
518 Due to machines’ capacity to free production of all limitations regarding skill, strength etc., machinery throws all members of the family onto the labour market, thereby depreciating it.
To purchase the labour-power of a whole family of four might cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labour-power of one family member but four days’ labour takes the place of one day and the price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus labour of four over the surplus labour of one.
In this way machinery exploits more people and increases the extent of exploitation.
Footnote on the feminisation of the labour force
519 On patriarchal relations within the family under capitalism.
526 Machinery is the most powerful means of lengthening the working day beyond all natural limits.
527 The productivity of machinery is inversely proportional to the value transferred to it by the product. The longer it functions the greater the mass of products over which the value transmitted by the machine is spread and the smaller the portion of that value added to each single commodity.
The active lifetime of the machine is dependent on the length of the working day, the duration of the daily labour process and the number of days for which the process is carried on.
The amount of deterioration suffered by a machine does not correspond to the length of time it has been in use.
528 A machine deteriorates in three ways: i) use, which is proportional to the use of the machine ii) lack of use, which is inversely proportional iii) loss of exchange value through better machines of the same kind being produced more cheaply.
In the third instance value is no longer determined by the necessary labour-time objectified within it but the labour-time necessary to reproduce it or the better machine.
529 Increasing the number of workers being exploited requires increasing the quantity of raw materials and the amount of constant capital laid out in machines or buildings.
The lengthening of the working day, by contrast, permits an expansion of the scale of production without any change in the amount of capital invested in machinery and buildings.
In this second instance, surplus-value increases and the outlay necessary to obtain it diminishes.
Machine production ties capital to a form which is constantly capable of valorisation but on the other hand loses use-value and exchange value whenever it is not in contact with living labour; every hour the fixed capital is not being used the capitalist may be said to be losing money.
530 As machinery comes into general use in a particular section of production, the social value of the machine’s product sinks to a general level.
Surplus value arises only from variable capital.
The amount of surplus value depends on the rate of surplus value and the number of workers simultaneously employed while the rate is determined by the relative duration of the day which is taken up by necessary labour versus surplus labour performed in the course of the working day.
531 The number of workers depends on the ratio of variable to constant capital.
However much machinery might increase surplus labour at the expense of necessary labour by raising its productive power, it attains this result only by diminishing the number of workers employed by a given amount of capital, turning formerly variable capital into constant.
This comes into view when a machine becomes general in industry; capitalists will try to extend the working day to secure compensation for the decrease in the relative number of labourers exploited by increasing not only relative but also absolute surplus labour.
532 Hence machinery sweeps away all customs and moral laws restricting the working day. This is how the instrument that can reduce labour time to an extent that is historically unprecedented becomes the means of turning the worker and his family into slaves at capital’s disposal.
533 As machinery becomes generalised the longer working day is compatible only with a lower degree of intensity; the higher intensity labour is only compatible with a shorter working day, as was seen after legislation was introduced to restrict the working day’s length in England.
534 Capital attempts to increase relative surplus value by increasing worker productivity. The same amount of labour is exerted, but this unchanged amount of exchange value is spread over more use-values, hence the value of each single commodity falls.
The reduction in working hours gives an immense impetus to the development of productivity; a denser working day crystallises more hours of labour.
545 One of the key differences between manufacture and industry is the machine transfers the worker’s skill to the machine, separating them it from human labour power.
This destroys manufacture’s hierarchy of specialised workers; the work to be done in an industrial factory is brought down to an identical level, with the occasional exception of those who maintain the machine and thereby retain some form of specialised technical or engineering acumen.
546 Workers can therefore be continually replaced without any interruption to the production process.
554 The antagonism that exists between capital and labour is present under manufacture and legible in e.g. protest action characterised by the smashing of machines but it reaches a new, higher stage here.
556 The new colonial markets put pressure on urban workers as well as the rural population who had been kicked off their land as feudalism declines.
557 The division of labour reduces a worker’s role on the market to the level of a tool-handler; when it becomes the job of the machine to handle the tool the use-value of the worker’s labour power vanishes, along with its exchange value.
This section of the working class is thereby rendered superfluous by machinery; flooding more accessible sections of the labour market with their labour power and thereby bringing about a general decline in the price of labour-power in general.
559 This antagonism is clearest when new machinery enters into competition with handicrafts or manufactures handed down from former times, but the substance of the relationship is analogous when improvements are introduced in an industrial context.
561 Historical material on the effects of the American civil war on the cotton market.
563 Further material on how workers recognise this antagonism and respond to it; how the introduction of an invention for dressing warps in the printing industry led to a strike.
565 Proof that demonstrates that workers thrown off the labour market by machines are not re-meployed, against arguments to the contrary provided by bourgeois economists.
570 Machinery might increase employment in certain sectors but in overall terms it puts labourers out of jobs and does not compensate them for this loss.
We could only say that the amount of labour required to produce a commodity had been diminished if the total quantity of an article produced by a machine was less than or equal to the amount of an article produced by handicraft or manufacture but in fact the total quantity of the article produced by machinery with a diminished number of workers exceeds that amount by orders of magnitude; we can see this by the increase of raw materials which industrial production made necessary.
The further machinery extends in a given industry the more production is increased in other industries which provide the first sector with means of production.
571 Machinery greatly increased the number of men working in coal and metal mines (Marx notes that at time of writing this trend is reversing as mining becomes more mechanised).
The development of a cotton spinning machine promoted the cotton industry in the US and the slave-trade as well as slave-breeding.
572 Similarly transformed Ireland from arable land into pasture as well as reducing its population by half.
As machinery increases the mass of raw materials, half-finished products and instruments of labour, these processes are split into innumerable sub-divisions. The division of labour therefore occurs in industrial production to a far greater extent than in manufacture.
573 The relatively diminished number of workers required to produce the means of subsistence and the increasing wealth of particular social strata begets new markets for luxury goods; a larger potion of the social product is converted into surplus product and a larger portion of this is reproduced and consumed in a multitude of refined shapes.
Colonial markets also diversify production; not only are greater quantities of foreign luxury articles exchanged for home products but a greater mass of raw materials, ingredients and half-finished articles from overseas are used as means of production in domestic industry.
New branches of production are opened up in infrastructural investment such as canals, docks, tunnels, bridges etc.
574 As does non-productive employment for the working class; in services, as domestic servants etc.
575 - 7 Orthodox bourgeois economists defend the horrors industrialisation unleashes on the working class by arguing that it increases the number of jobs but in fact the numbers employed decrease; where increases are seen they primarily consist of women or people under 18.
578 When industrial production first becomes generalised capitalists recoup historically unprecedented profits. Additional social capital is constantly being created and seeking new areas of investment.
579 Once the factory system has reached a point of maturity, Marx defines this as the point at which its machinery is being produced by machinery in the metallurgical or mining industries and the means of transportation have been revolutionised, its only limitations are the availability of raw materials and effective demand.
[Imperialism]
Machinery dramatically increases the amount of available raw materials; their cheapness provide weapons for the conquest of foreign markets (both figurative and literal) which forcibly convert them into fields for the production of raw materials; in this way India is compelled to produce cotton + wool for England.
Foreign lands are also colonised and converted into settlements for growing raw materials for the benefit of industry in the mother country, e.g. Australia.
580 This converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains industrial, dividing labour on an international or global scale.
This also creates the possibility of over-production; industry becomes prone to a series of periods characterised by alternation from moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis, stagnation, unemployment (feverish production -> glut on the market -> contraction of the market -> crippling of production)
588 Example of the state backing capitalist production by preventing workers from emigrating.
589 Example of the transition from handicraft to manufacture to industry in the English ribbon industry.
591 Until the strength of the worker becomes autonomous of the production process emoloyment of children in industry would not have been possible.
602 - 3 Some examples of the transitional forms which develop in particular industries, which in turn determine which machines predominate in in these sectors, the period of time it has been in operation, the condition of the workers, the degree to which manufacture, handicrafts or domestic industry predominates.
A concrete examination of the dress industry reveals that machinery subsists within a system of manufacture.
This tendency does not, of course, conceal the tendency which is operating to transform them into the factory system proper; steam power delivers the final blow.
604 How the regulations introduced by the Factory Acts further accelerates industrialisation and the introduction of steam power.
609 Capitalists will regard any attempt at regulating their activity via the state as a barrier and obstructed the activity of factory inspectors.
611 Though the acts have been successful in offering partial redress to seasonal cycles of employment and unemployment, spreading the work more evenly throughout the year inadequacies still prevail, as in the Irish flax industry where maimings and fatal injuries remain common.
612 Against the dogma of free trade, capitalism impedes all rational improvement past a certain point; an obligation to provide sufficient ventilation space to ensure the workers remain healthy would strike at the very logic of capital accumulation.
Chapter 16: Absolute and Relative Surplus Value
643 As labour becomes increasingly social each component part of the universal totality of labouring power becomes increasingly separated from every other part.
644 Bourgeois economists have historically equated the production of surplus value with productivity in general. As such their conception of productivity has varied in line with the variations in surplus value.
645 Absolute surplus value refers to the extension of the working day.
This is the starting point of the capitalist system, and also the point at which relative surplus-value becomes possible, as this requires that the working day be divided into two parts - one in which necessary labour is taking place and another in which surplus value is being generated.
Relative surplus value is increased by reducing the amount of socially necessary labour. The increase in the amount of absolute surplus being generated depends on the length of the working day, while an increase in relative surplus requires the revolutionising of the technical processes of labour.
This is the essence of the capitalist mode of production and it develops or is extended firstly through formal subsumption of capital under labour and secondly through real subsumption.
[Historical transition to capitalism]
While at early stages of capitalist construction surplus value may not be extracted through compulsion or force, capital has not yet subordinated labour, or developed total control over the labour process.
One example may be the merchant or usurer who steps between independent producers and the market in the middle ages. Though this is not capitalism, Marx suggests it may be a hybrid form and lay the necessary foundations.
Absolute surplus value may be produced under formal subsumption; all that is necessary here is for a handicraftsmen who previously worked for themselves or apprentices of a master to become wage labourers under a capitalist.
646 Methods of increasing relative surplus-value are at the same time means of securing increases in absolute surplus value, as the extension of the working day is a central fixture of large-scale industry.
The capitalist mode of production ceases to be a mere means of the generation of surplus value once it has conquered an entire branch of industry and especially when it has captured all of the most important branches.
It only continues to be the exceptional method of generating surplus value insofar as it seizes on industries only formally subordinate to capital and secondly insofar as these industries already seized are further revolutionised.
The distinction between relative and absolute surplus value may appear illusory, as relative surplus value is at the same time absolute; it requires the worker to work beyond those limits of the working day which are necessary to reproduce the workers’ condition of existence, and secondly absolute is relative; it requires as it requires the development of the productivity of labour, allowing necessary labour time to be restricted to a specific portion of the day.
But in fact this similarity is illusory and this is clear once the imperative is felt to elevate the rate of surplus value.
Assuming labour power is paid for at its value, if productivity of labour and its normal degree of intensity is given, its rate can only be raised by increasing the length of the working day, in absolute terms.
If the length of the working day is given, the rate of surplus value can be raised only by a change in the relative magnitudes of the working day, necessary as compared with surplus labour.
If wages are not to fall below the value of labour-power, this change presupposes a change in either the productivity or the intensity of labour.
647 - 8 Notes on the nature of civilisation in pre-history and leisure time in satisfying social and physical requirements - Egyptian civilisation had the scope to develop to the extent that it did because of the extent of leisure time that was available once physical needs had been satisfied in that place and time.
649 This does not mean that capitalism is established wherever the soil is most fertile; there is a line + a footnote about how the ready satisfaction of physical needs can constrain development as it makes people careless and proud rather than vigilant and abstemious.
It is the variety of natural products which form the basis of the division of labour, the necessity of bringing a natural force under society’s control. Examples provided include the development of irrigation in India, the regulation of water in Holland and Egypt.
650 Favourable natural conditions offer only the possibility, not the guarantee of surplus; natural requirements themselves vary from place to place.
651 Surplus time may be available but whether or not this leisure time is deployed productively depends on these contextual factors.
In this way capitalism is historically and socially determined; surplus is not an inherent quality.
652 - 654 Critiques of Mill and Ricardo.
Chapter 17: Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus-Value
655 The value of labour-power is determined by the value of the means of subsistence.
Subsistence requirements vary according to social, historical economic factors.
The cost of developing this power is important, as is the natural diversity of labour-power, the difference between the labour-power of men as compared with women and children, these are all crucial in opening up the vast differences in the costs of reproducing the worker and his family.
Relative magnitudes of surplus values therefore depend on
i) the length of the working day or the extensive magnitude of labour ii) the normal intensity of labour or its intensive magnitude iii) the productivity of labour, whereby the same quantity of labour yields, in a given time, a greater or lesser quantity of the product.
Chapter 19: The Transformation of the Value (and respectively the price) of Labour-Power into Wages
675 Bourgeois economists regard the price of labour as its value, but the value of a commodity is the amount of socially necessary labour-time it took to produce it.
676 A direct exchange of objectified labour power in money for labour-power would represent a violation of the law of value; in a capitalist society, this is not the way things are done.
If the worker did receive the value of his labour-power in the form of money it would follow that the worker was producing no surplus, which is also incompatible with the capitalist mode of production.
Nor is it the case that surplus arises out of the difference between wages and recouped surplus.
677 The notion of a ‘value of labour’ is in fact an abstraction, labour has no value, rather value is immanent to it.
678 Supply and demand therefore cannot explain the value of labour, even when we take an ideal average across an entire economy over a specific length of time, because a wage is just an accidental value or quantity. It cannot be calculated as a mere cost of production as some attempted to do.
680 Part of the reason for this is that it is part of the capitalist mode of production that it is never clear that the worker is working for free; surplus and necessary labour are obfuscated in the labour process.
681 Wages fluctuate independently of the value of labour-power, which depends on broader factors.
682 The capitalist doesn’t perceive this difference either; it is rather in the nature of the market, wherein the capitalist buys as cheaply as possible and seels as high as possible; it appears to them that this is the source of thier profits.
[Slavery]
Under slavery the advantage / disadvantage of labour-power above / below the average falls on the slaveholder, while under capitalism it rebounds to the worker.
Chapter 20: Time-Wages
683 A worker may receive vastly different sums of money for the same quantity of labour.
684 The average price of labour is the average value of labour-power divided by the average number of hours in the working day.
In this sense the price of labour is not the same as wages; they may move independently of one another.
685 However as a general law it follows that given the amount of daily, weekly labour, the daily weekly wage depends on the price of labour, which itself varies either with the value of labour-power or with the divergences between its price and its value.
Given the price of labour, on the other hand, the daily or weekly wage depends on the quantity of labour expended weekly or daily.
The unit of measurement for time wages, the price of the working hour, is the value of a day’s labour power divided by the number of hours in the average working day.
This is not a tautology because it indicates the amount of hours the worker has to labour in order to reproduce their conditions of existence. If their minimum working hours do not attain a certain threshold surplus is generated, but not the amount of value required to allow the worker to reproduce their own conditions of existence.
686 This is how underemployment, as opposed to over-work can have deleterious consequences for the worker.
689 The artificial shortening of the working day increases competition between workers, allowing the employer to reduce the price of labour (with the average price of the total number of weekly hours decreasing) and thereafter reduce wages, which allows him to increase the hours of work.
Chapter Twenty-One: Piece-Wages
694 Quantifying the amount of value in a commodity generated in a context in which the worker is being paid according to output is not a matter of calculating duration but rather the amount of products in which the labour has been embodied during a given time.
The quality of the output is also an important factor in the payment of piece-wages, a certain average standard must be maintained. In this way piece-wages become an important site of struggle between the worker and the capitalist regarding standards and remuneration.
695 It is also a form of work in which it is straightforward for various kinds of capitalist parasites to interpose themselves between the worker and the capitalist, as in the ‘sweating system’.
It is in the interests of the workers to strain his labour power as intensely as possible, this also makes it easier for the capitalist to raise the intensity of labour.
696 These individual differences between strength and skill of the workers form an average, as in wage labour.
Chapter 22: National Differences in Wages
701 Calculating how these laws governing the transformation of labour-power into the price of labour power and then into wages function on a national level requires bearing in mind the level of subsistence requirements or what factors determine the changes in the value of labour power; subsistence according to historical and social developments, cost of training to workers, role of women and children etc.
702 The average intensity of labour varies from nation to nation and expresses itself in greater or lesser amounts of money.
As each nation arrives at an average labour, this happens at an international scale also.
Law of value is further distorted on an international level in instances where the more productive nation is not compelled to lower the prices of their commodities by competition to their value.
Capitalist production rises in proportion with the intensity and productivity of labour. Different quantities of commodities of the same type, produced in different countries at the same working time therefore possess unequal national values which express themselves in different prices.
The relative value of money will therefore be less in a nation with a relatively developed capitalism than those which are less developed. Nominal wages will threfore be higher in the former than the latter, which is not to say that their purchasing power will extend further.
705 Example of a bourgeois economist who seeks to link wages with productivity, and argue that the state exerts a distorting influence on the market, rather than, as Marx argues, functions as a guarantor.
Part Seven: The Process of Accumulation of Capital
709 - 10 The transformation of money into means of production and labour-power is the first phase of the movement that value is to undergo when it is transformed into capital. The second phase, circulation, is complete once the means of production have been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, i.e. when it contains the capital originally advanced, as well as a surplus.
These commodities will then have their value realised as money by being sold and the revenue will be transformed again into capital and so on.
For the purposes of this section Marx assumes that this circulation of capital takes place frictionlessly. On that basis we are not concerned with the forms capital assumes when in the sphere of circulation.
The capitalist who extracts surplus value from the workers and fixes it in commodities is the first appropriator of surplus value but he is not its ultimate proprietor, rather he shares the surplus with other capitalists who fulfill other social functions. Surplus-value is therefore split into various parts, its fragments fall to various categories of person and takes on various independent forms, such as profit, interest, rent. These are taken up in Volume 3, but here we take the capitalist producer as their representative.
Chapter 23: Simple Reproduction
711 Whatever the mode of production it has to take place continuously, periodically reproducing its distinct phases; in this way the reproduction of capitalist production too has a capitalist form.
712 If the revenue the capitalist recoups from the surplus serves the ends of his consumption and is consumed as periodically as it is gained, simple reproduction taken place, meaning a mere repetition of the process of production on the same scale as before.
The purchase of the worker’s labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude to the production process. But the worker is not paid until after he has expended his labour-power and realised both the value of his labour-power and a certain quantity of surplus-value in the shape of commodities; he has therefore produced not only surplus-value but also the variable capital, the fund, out of which he is paid.
713 The capitalist class therefore gives to the worker drafts, in the form of money, on a portion of the product produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The workers give these drafts back just as constantly to the capitalist and thereby withdraw from the latter their allotted share of their own product; this transaction is veiled by the commodity form of the product and the money-form of the commodity.
716 This is a process which is constantly renewed and perpetuated. Production converts natural wealth into capital, both the capitalist’s means of enjoyment and his means of valorisation while the worker always leaves the production process in the same condition he entered into it.
717 For the worker there are two types of consumption. While producing he consumes the means of production with his labour, converting them into products with a higher value than that of the capital advanced; this is productive consumption. It is at the same time consumption of his labour-power by the capitalist who bought it.
On the other hand the worker uses his wages to buy his means of subsistence. The worker’s productive consumption and his individual consumption are distinct; in the former he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist, in the latter he belongs to himself and performs necessary vital functions outside the production process. Marx describes as the worker’s individual consumption as an abuse, rather than an essential attribute of the capitalist mode of production because all the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to a necessary minimum.
719 In this sense the working class, when it stands outside the direct labour process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instruments of labour. Even its individual consumption is - within certain limits - a mere aspect of the process of capital’s reproduction.
Individual consumption provides on the one hand, the means for the worker’s maintenance and reproduction and on the other their continued re-appearance on the labour-market.
723 Capitalist production therefore continually reproduces the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour; it reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited, forces him to sell his labour-power to live and enables the capitalist to purchase his labour-power power so he can enrich himself.
In this sense it is not an accident that the capitalist and worker encounter one another in the market as buyer or seller, but rather the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market as a seller of his labour power.
Chapter 24: The Transformation of Surplus-Value into Capital
726 A capital-value is initially advanced in the form of money, initiating the productive process. If this is sold and converted into money it regains its original form as capital-value.
Accumulation requires a portion of the surplus product to be converted into capital, but we cannot transform into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process and such further articles are as suitable for the sustenance of the worker.
727 Consequently, a part of the annual surplus labour must have been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence, over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced. In other words, surplus-value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product already comprises the material components of a new quantity of capital.
In order for these components to function as capital the capitalist class requires additional labour, if the exploitation of workers already employed does not increase, additional labour-powers must be enlisted.
Capitalist production allows for this by the creation and reproduction of a class of labourers who depend on wages.
733 - 5 The commodities the capitalist buys as part of the surplus-value for his own consumption do not serve as means of production or means of valorisation.
Similarly, the labour he buys for satisfaction of his natural and social requirements do not serve as productive labour. Instead of transforming surplus-value into capital he consumes or expends it as revenue when he purchases those commodities and that labour.
736 Bourgeois economists are correct to maintain the consumption of the surplus product by productive workers is a characteristic feature of accumulation, but they are wrong to present it as this and nothing else. Surplus value is divided into constant and variable capital. The labour-power is consumed by the capitalist while the means of production are consumed by the labour-power in the exercise of its function, e.g. labour.
738 The argument that it is the workers who consume the net product is capitalist apologia.
The surplus value or surplus product is both the means of capital accumulation and the means through which the capitalist satisfies his own consumption requirements.
739 Through the capitalist’s fanatical desire to further accumulate he forces the human race to produce for production’s sake, spurs the development of society’s productive forces and the creation of the material conditions for a higher form of society. This development requires the increasing laying out of a constantly increasing amount of capital in a given industrial undertaking; competition subordinates every capitalist to external and coercive laws.
741 At an earlier phase in capitalist development this avaricious drive to accumulate is what drives the capitalist forward, credit arises at a mature phase and becomes a business necessity.
747 - 8 The magnitude of accumulation depends on the mass of surplus value.
The rate of surplus value depends on the degree of the exploitation of labour power; reduction of wages below the value of labour-power is therefore an important source of raising the rate of surplus value extracted from the labour process; the tendency of capital is therefore to force the cost of labour back to zero.
749 - 50 Examples of measures taken to this end, up to and including theft from the workers’ consumption fund.
751 - 2 Across extractive, classical industry and agriculture examples of how increased exploitation of labour power is what drives accumulation rather than increasing constant capital, with a view to underlining that with labour-power and land capital acquires a power of expansion that allows it to accumulate beyond the apparent limits of its own magnitude.
The mass of products in which a given value is embodied increases with the productivity of labour.
752 - 3 Series of examples of how the ratio between mass:rate, consumption: accumulation fund can vary but the increase in productivity and accumulation will always rebound to the detriment of the worker; increasing productivity of labour is accompanied by a cheapening of labour-power.
It also allows for replacement of and more efficient use of old machinery.
756 This appears as an increase in the capacities of capital.
Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
1. A Growing Demand for Labour-Power Accompanies Accumulation if the Composition of Capital Remains the Same
762 The composition of capital is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital (means of production, the value composition or organic composition) and variable capital (the value of labour power, the sum total of all wages, the technical composition).
This varies across sector but forms an average.
763 Growth of capital implies a growth in the wage fund.
Since the total social capital produces a surplus every year of which one part is added to the capital every year, a point will eventually be reached at which the demands of capital is not equal to the supply of labour and wages will rise.
765 Accumulation of capital therefore brings about an increase in the size of the labouring population.
768 - 9 This increased share in the surplus product may allow the labourer to increase their consumption fund, increase their stock of material comforts and save more but it does not change the fundamentally exploitative relationship that exists between labourer and capitalist - an increase in wages merely means a reduction in the amount of unpaid labour the worker has to provide to the capitalist.
770 Either this reduction in the amount of unpaid labour in no way interferes with the accumulation process and the domain of capital continues to extend, or it does, and the impetus that led to the increase in wages in the first place, a disproportion between capital and labour, slackens. In this way the capitalist mode of production removes those obstacles it creates and the price of labour falls to the level adequate to capital’s requirements.
It is the accumulation of capital which acts upon the wage rate, rather than the other way around.
A Relative Diminution in the Variable Part of Capital Occurs in the Course of Further Progress of Accumulation and of the Concentration Accompanying It
772 A point is reached in the course of accumulation that the development of the social productivity of labour is the most important lever of accumulation.
773 This is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production that one worker, in a given time and by a given intensity, produces products.
Some of this increase is due to productivity gains secured by the division of labour, together with the application of machinery, more raw materials may be worked upon. On the other hand the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, means of transport are important.
This growth in the mass of the means of production expresses itself in the growth of the organic composition of capital relative to the technical component; an important source of accumulation is therefore also an increase in exploitation.
774 Accumulation therefore lessens the relative magnitude of the variable part of capital but this does not exclude the possibility of a rise in its absolute magnitude.
775 The development of capitalism, large-scale industry, the accumulation of capital in the hands of individual producers represents a necessary starting point. This is called primitive accumulation.
776 The growth of many individual capitals concentrates wealth in the hands of individual capitalists and forms a broader social capital. Simultaneously offshoots split off from the original capitals and function as new independent capitals.
777 The concept of centralisation is introduced here, which is the concentration of capitals already formed, the destruction of their individual independence, the expropriation of capitalist by capitalist.
This process is distinct from accumulation in the sense that it presupposes a change in the distribution of capital that is already available and already functioning. Its field of action is not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth or he absolute limits of accumulation, it is rather zero-sum, capital grows in one place because it has been lost in another.
Competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends on the productivity of labour and this depends on the scale of production; big capitals beat the smaller.
It will be recalled that with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. Smaller capitals therefore move into spheres of production which large-scale industry has taken only incomplete or sporadic control.
Here competition occurs in direct proportion to the number, and in inversse proportion to the magnitude of the rival capitals; it always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists.
779 As competition develops so too do technical instruments necessary to centralisation of capital, such as credit. These developments renders the motive force behind centralisation stronger than historically.
Centralisation does not depend on positive growth in the magnitude of social capita; this is what distinguishes centralisation from concentration, this being another name for reproduction on a larger scale.
Centralisation may result from a mere change in the distribution of already existing capitals, from a simple alteration in the quantitative grouping of the component parts of social capital.
Centralisation supplements the work of accumulation by enabling industrial capitalists to extend the scale of their operations, whether as a consequence of accumulation or centralisation, violent annexation or the fusion of a number of capitals through the organising of joint-stock companies.
780 But the gradual increase of capital by reproduction is a very slow procedure compared with centralisation, as the latter needs only to change the quantitative groupings of the constituent parts of social capital. If the construction of railways depended on the accumulation of capital it would have taken longer; with centralisation it was accomplished far quicker due to joint-stock companies.
Centralisation speeds up accumulation and its effects and it also accelerates revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant portion at the expense of its variable portion, diminishing the relative demand for labour.
781 The accumulation of capital comes to fruition through through a contuining increase of its constant component at the expense of its variable component.
The capitalist mode of production, and the change in the organic composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the progress of accumulation;l they develop at a much quicker rate, because the absolute expansion of total social capital is accompanied by the centralisation of its individual elements, the demand for variable capital declines with a greater amount of accumulation.
782 This relative diminution of the relative component takes place at the same time as an absolute increase in the working population, which moves more rapidly. Capital accumulation therefore constantly produces a relatively redundant working population superfluous to capital’s average valorisation requirements.
The composition of capital differs across sectors; in some industrial areas it might change without any increase in its absolute magnitude and just as a consequence of simple concentration, or additional labour is attracted on the basis of its increasing technical basis, the point is that across all spheres the increase in the variable parts of capital and the number of workers employed by it, is always connected with violent fluctuations and the temporary production of a surplus population.
783 The greater magnitude of social capital, its greater productive capacity extends the scale at which capital is capable of attracting workers, but it also repels them; in this sense workers reproduce both the accumulation of capital and the means by which they themselves are made relatively superfluous.
784 - 5 This surplus population becomes a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production as it forms an industrial reserve army, always ready to be thrown into decisive sectors of production at any point in a given industrial cycle.
788 The number of workers under capital may remain the same or fall while the variable capital increases, as would be the case if the industrial worker provided more labour and his wages increased, though the price of labour remains the same or falls, more slowly than the mass of labour rises. An increase of variable capital therefore becomes an index of more labour, but not of workers employed. It is in fact in the interest of every capitalist to extort a given quantity of labour out of a smaller rather than a greater number of workers, if the cost is the same.
As the capitalist mode of production develops the capitalist buys with the same capital a greater quantity of labour-power as he progressively replaces skilled workers with less skilled workers, mature labour-power with immature.
Therefore as accumulation develops a larger variable capital sets more labour in motion without enlisting more workers, while a variable capital of the same magnitude mobilises more labour with the same mass of labour power; finally, a greater number of inferior labour-power is set in motion by the displacement of more skilled labour-powers.
789 The production of a relative surplus population therefore proceeds more rapidly than the technical transformation of the process of production that accompanies the advance of accumulation and is accelerated by it, and more rapidly than the corresponding diminiution of the variable part of capital as compared with the constant.
If the means of production are less and less sources of employment this relation is modified by the fact that as the productivity of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for workers. The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the rank of its reserve, while the greater pressure that the reserve, by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and the dictates of capital.
790 The general movement of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army and this in turn corresponds with the periodic alternations of the industrial cycle.
They are not therefore determined by population but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into an active or a reserve army, as opposed to, as the bourgeois economists do, regard population as the most important factor.
792 If accumulation in a particular sphere of production becomes active and profits in it, becoming greater than average, attract additional capital, than the demand for labour, as well as wages, rise within it. These higher wages draw in a larger part of the working population until it is glutted with labour power and wages fall again to their average level. At this point the influx of workers not only ceases but leads to an outflow.
The political economist thinks he sees an absolute diminution of workers accompanying an increase of wages, and a diminution of wages accompanying an increase of workers but what he is looking at is only the local oscillations of the labour-market in a particular sphere of production.
During periods of stagnation and average prosperity, the industrial reserve army weighs down the active army of workers, during periods of over-production and feverish activity it puts a curb on their pretensions.
793 The demand for labour is therefore not identical with the increase of capital; it is not a case of two independent forces working on each other, capital acts on both sides at once; if its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of workers by ‘setting them free, while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers.
795 Note about how the institution of marriage is dictated by capital accumulation.
796 A specific category within the relative surplus population is stagnant: its conditions fall below the average normal level of the working class and these are characterised by a maximum of working time and a minimum of wages. It is constantly recruited from workers in large-scale industry and manufacture who have become unemployed, especially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft is giving way to manufacture and manufacture to machinery.
797 The lowest sediment of the relative surplus population is the lumpenproletariat, composed of criminals, vagabonds and prostitutes. It consists of three categories; those able to work, orphans and pauper children who ar, in times of prosperity, speedily recruited as workers and third the demoralised, the ragged and those unable to work incapable and victims of industry, mutilated, injured, widows.
799 Argument is that in proportion as capital accumulates the situation of the worker grows worse.
Part Eight: So-called Primitive Accumulation
Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation
873 The accumulation of capital pre-suiposes surplus-value, surplus-value presupposes capitalist production and capitalist production presupposes the availability of masses of capital and labour-power in the hands of commodity producers; only the assumption of capitalism’s original sin: primitive accumulation, can break the never-ending circle.
874 ‘In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest farce…the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic’.
Chapter 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land
877 Dates the end of serfdom in England to the last part of the fourteenth century, when the vast majority of the population consisted of free peasant proprietors; the serfs were replaced with the free farmers, wage labourers were few in numberand had the right of farming the common land.
878 Feudal production is characterised by the division of the soil amongst the greatest possible number of sub-feudatories.
Towards the end of the fifteenth and the start of the sixteenth century a mass of free and unattached proletarians were thrown onto the labour market by the dissolution of the bands of feudal retainers who were a drain on royal resources.
Though royal power - itself a product of bourgeois development - forcibly hastened the dissolution of these bands in striving for absolute soverignty it was not its sole cause, another contributor was the great feudal lords creating a large proletariat by forcibly driving the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal title as the lords themselves due to the rapid expansion of wool manufacture in Flanders and the corresponding rise in the price of wool; there was an enormous economic incentive associated with converting arable land into sheep walks.
883 The property of the church was the last bulwark of landed property, when this fell landed property could not endure.
In the last few decades of the seventeenth entury the yeomanry, a class of indepdentn peasants were more numerous than farmers; they had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength.
883 - 884 Marx leaves aside the economic compulsion undergirding these changes to focus instead on the nakedly coercive means employed, as after the restoration of the Stuarts an act of usurpation was effected everywhere without legal formality, abolishing ithe feudal tenure of land, geting rid of all obligations to the state, indemnified the state by imposing taxes on the peasantry, established the rights of modern private property in estates to which they had only a feudal title and passed laws of settlement which had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer.
The glorious revolution brought the landed and capitalists into power who stolen state lands which had previously been managed more modestly, often by direct seizure without any legal etiquette, forming the basis of the present English oligarchy.
885 The bourgeois capitalists did so to convert the land into a merely commercial commodity, extending the area of large-scale agricultural production and increasing the supply of free and rightless proletarians.
This new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new bankocracy, nascent new finance and large manufacturers, at that time largely dependent on protective duties.
Chapter 28: Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century. The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament
896 The now landless proletariat were turned in masssive quantities into bandits, leading to the introduction of harsh coercive measures to counter the rise of vagabondage throughout Europe in the late fifteenth early sixteenth centuries.
899 As capitalist production advances the working class looks to the requirements of the mode of production as self-evident natural laws, ‘The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker’.
900 When a class of wage-labourers first arose in the fourteenth century, they composed a very small portion of the population, well protected by independent peasant proprietors in the countryside and by the organisation of guilds in the towns. The subordination of labour was here only formal, the variable element in capital preponderated over the constant element, the mode of production did not have a wholly capitalist character.
Chapter 30: Impact on the Agricultural Revolution on Industry. The Creation of a Home Market for Industrial Capital
908 - 11 The expropriation and proletarianisation of peasant farmers supplied urban industries with waged labourers not insulated by corporate guilds. This process consolidates the previously dispersed markets which supported small manufacture.
912 Footnote about the improved position of the English peasantry while Cromwell was in power.
Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist
914 Two forms of capital arise in the middle ages; usurer’s capital and merchant’s capital.
915 Money capital developed out of usury and commerce was prevented from developing into industrial capital by feudal organisation of the countryside and the guild organisation of the towns; these barriers disappeared with the dissolution of the feudal bands of retainers and eviction of the rural population.
The discvoery of gold and silver in America, ensalvement of the indigenous population, conquest and plunder of India and Africa; all characterise the rise of capitalist production: chief moments of primitive accumulation, followed by commercial wars between European nations, beginning with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in England’s anti-Jacobin War, still going in the shape of the Opium Wars against China.
Primitive accumulation follows a sequence of Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England; these are combined systematically in the seventeenth century in England, the combination embraces the colonies the national debt the modern tax system and the system of protection.
916 - 7 Emphasises the ways in which colonialism, the deployment of brute force hasten the transformation of the feudal mode of production, indigenous population forced to work on plantations for export in the West Indies, the Dutch in the Philippines.
918 At the time Marx is writing industrial supremacy brings commercial supremacy, but in the period of manufacture it is the inverse; commercial supremacy produces industrial predominance, hence the importance of the colonial system.
919 The system of public credit, the origins of which began in Genoa and Venice took possession of Europe during the period of manufacture. The colonial system served as a forcing-house for the credit system, took root first in Holland. The national debt marked the capitalist era with its stamp, the only part of the so-called national wealth which enters into the collective possession of the modern nation: one of the most important levers of primitive accumulation, turning unproductive money with the power of creation turning it into capital without forcing it to expose itself to the risks of industry or usury; given rise to stock-exchange gambling and modern bankocracy.
920 Along with the national debt there is an international credit system, another means of facilitating primitive accumulation.
921 This also led to the creation of a modern tax system to service the national debt as a necessary complement, allowing the government to meet expenses but also as a method of dispossessing the lower middle class.
Chapter 33: The Modern Theory of Colonisation
931 - 2 Emphasises the role of the state and state coercion in the establishment of colonial regimes and the apologetics produced by bourgeois economists - refers to colonies established in the Americas as ‘virgin soil’, little to say about the civilisations in place when Europeans arrived.
934 Material on the difficulty involved in attracting waged labourers in the United States; while the motor of the capitalist mode of production is the proletarianisation of the peasantry a colony is noteworthy for the fact that the land is public property and every settler can turn a part of it into his private property without preventing subsequent settlers from doing the same thing.
936 The fact that wage labourers are in a position to become self-sufficient small proprietors makes attracting wage labourers difficult, creating problems for capitalists.